Dungeon Siege Post Mortem @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

September 8th, 2007, 03:02

Before you wonder why there is a post-mortem of Dungeon Siege in the news, this is apparently an older interview article Kieron Gillen put up at Rock, Paper, Shotgun while he visits Gas Powered Games to presumably cover their current stuff. At any rate, here's a revealing quote from Chris Taylor:

“We were really big fans of Diablo,” explains Chris when asked to explain where the concept for Dungeon Siege came from, “We really enjoyed that. In our business, we really do build on games ideas from one to the next. So if we see a game we really like we try and work out ways to improve it. When I saw Diablo, I was like “Awesome!”. Because I didn’t even know there was a market for that kind of game. I played Wizardry back in the 80s, and I loved it. But what happens is if no-one makes a game we don’t know if anyone wants to buy it. So we sometimes think a genre is dead. When Diablo was successful it was like: “AWESOME! Let’s build an RPG game… and let’s really go after the things which we think make RPGs great.” That is, exploration. Cool loot. Fantastic spells, and all that kind of thing.”

Yeah, that's how the business works today in a lot of cases, doesn't it? There used to be so few genre-defining games that there was room for experimentation. Now, the analysts can calculate projected sales and tell management if it's a good idea to develop a game or not. Sad but true.

I liked the original becasue it had nice and fresher look than the tired and dated diablo series but by the time DS2 came out I was just getting burnt out on top down hack and slash.
I really still enjoy more RPG styled top downs NWN2, even titles like Hammer & Sickle were very good despite their rushed states by the publishers.

— Trust me, most of the names I have been called you can't translate in any language…they're not even real words as much as a succession of violent images.

I have to agree with that guy's point—I'm Seiged out also. And even in the first Dungeon Seige, there wasn't any seiging going on—it was the opposite of a seige(forced wait without staged combat outside a fortress) and if it were one, it wouldn't sell. Come to think of it, there weren't all that many dungeons either—in my memory I'm always trooping across some pixelated terrain dragging a mule and trying to find my party.

I liked the original because it had nice and fresher look than the tired and dated diablo series but by the time DS2 came out I was just getting burnt out on top down hack and slash….

I liked DS2 better, as I thought the character elements were a little more prominent, but I never finished either game. The problem for me was the hybridization—too many different blends so you really didn't get any one distinctive flavor. But I had fun with DS2, and I think Taylor did succeed in doing what he had in mind in making a popular arpg.